Parents call for independent oversight board for Anne Arundel police

De'Auntte Griffin-Dezurn, mother of Danshaun Wells, 14, who was hit by a car and killed in 2016, talks about a dream she had of her late son and her plans moving forward at her home in Baltimore on Tuesday, Aug. 14, 2018.

De'Auntte Griffin-Dezurn, mother of Danshaun Wells, 14, who was hit by a car and killed in 2016, talks about a dream she had of her late son and her plans moving forward at her home in Baltimore on Tuesday, Aug. 14, 2018.

Joshua StewartStaff writer

Years have passed since their loved ones died and police closed their investigations. And it’s been nearly as long since family members of the deceased started their own inquiries and pored over thousands of documents.

And now, after finding what they believe are discrepancies between police investigations and their own reports, family members want an independent board formed to look at their loved ones’ deaths and make sure their cases were properly handled.

Griffin-Dezurn said there were omissions in the official investigation into her son’s death that undermine the official conclusion that he died in a tragic, but innocent, accident.

As she continues to grieve, Griffin-Dezurn and others are pushing the state to create a civilian review board to oversee police investigations. The women formed Community Actively Seeking Transparency, a group to lobby for the review board.

Its leader, the Rev. Marguerite Morris, said she’s trying to convince candidates for state offices to support their effort.

The review board, Morris said, will be able to impartially determine if key details were overlooked in investigations, or if deaths that police concluded were accidents or suicides might have been a crime.

De'Auntte Griffin-Dezurn, mother of Danshaun Wells, 14, who was hit by a car and killed in 2016, at her home in Baltimore on Tuesday, Aug. 14, 2018.

(Staff Photos by Jen Rynda / BSMG)

Marc Limansky, a spokesman for Anne Arundel County police, said the department has not been approached about a civilian oversight board and it has no stance on the matter. But he said family members of people who died in accidents, crimes and suicides should stay in contact with investigators and should speak up when they see anything that disagrees with official conclusions.

“Certainly if someone finds information that conflicts with what's written, we urge them to call,” he said.

The new group, which calls itself CAST, is particularly concerned because increasing numbers of cell phone recordings and body cameras show that some police officers do not act with integrity, Morris said. She added that minorities are more likely to be affected by shoddy police work.

“We want the lives of all people to matter, and right now we’re not getting that,” Morris said at a CAST meeting at a Linthicum Library.

She points to similar oversight organizations in Prince George’s County and Baltimore City as possible models for Anne Arundel County.

Both boards investigate complaints against police officers over excessive force, abusive language, and false arrests and imprisonments. The panel in Prince George’s County also evaluates investigations to make sure that their conclusions are “reasonable and appropriate.”

Limansky said members of the public should speak up if they feel the investigation has been inadequate or conducted inappropriately, he said.

“We have oversight, if someone feels aggrieved in some way or that they didn’t believe that the case gets handled professionally, or whatever the issue was, to take it to a supervisor or higher,” he said.

Supervisors in the department’s chain of command make sure their subordinates follow proper protocols in investigations so that outcomes aren’t foregone conclusions, Limansky said. He said detectives are trained to keep all possible outcomes in play until they are eliminated by reasonable facts.

But Morris, Griffin-Dezurn and others said that in their family members’ cases, they believe police overlooked details undermining claims that their children killed themselves or were in deadly accidents.

Morris said that according to the official report her daughter, 22-year-old Katherine Morris, died in 2012 of carbon monoxide poisoning.

She was found in her still-running car parked behind an Anne Arundel Community College facility in Hanover with a bottle of sleeping pills and two lit charcoal grills inside. But despite the hot grills, there were no burn marks in the vehicle, a detail that doesn’t add up, Morris said.

And Kristie Lockwood said that according to the official report, her nephew, Eddie Woods, killed himself in Brooklyn Park in 2008, but statements from a witness and police report give inconsistent descriptions of how he was shot.

Griffin-Dezurn said an investigation into her son’s death didn’t mention there was a bike lane where he was hit, and also inaccurately said he was wearing dark clothing. She said these were crucial factors that might have led to a conclusion other than that he was killed in an accident.

“To this day it still saddens me that I have so many unanswered questions,” she said.

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